


to candle incandescent as you pass

by sweetwatersong



Series: the attic [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Snow White and the Huntsman Fusion, Alternate Universe - Stardust Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 01:20:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5608339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetwatersong/pseuds/sweetwatersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The legacy of King Tristan and the Star Queen Yvaine is not a mere tale in Stormhold, a fantastical portion of the kingdom's history. It lives and breathes in the blood of their descendants, in their long lives and graceful aging, in the ruling King Odin and his son, the Crown Prince Thor...</p><p>[The sketch of a Stardust/Snow White & The Huntsman AU.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	to candle incandescent as you pass

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of a Snow White & The Huntsman/Stardust/Thor fusion has been floating around in my head for quite some time. However, the most that I ever actually _wrote_ of it was the ending. If I ever manage to write out the rest of it - which, oh man, do I ever want to - it will be posted. In light of how extremely unlikely that is, I hope you enjoy the walkthrough and the ending.
> 
> Warning: A major character death and short references to blood.

The legacy of King Tristan and the Star Queen Yvaine is not a mere tale in Stormhold, a fantastical portion of the kingdom's history. It lives and breathes in the blood of their descendants, in their long lives and graceful aging, in the ruling King Odin and his son, the Crown Prince Thor. Though no one could have known it then, Yvaine's great love would continue to shape Stormhold far beyond the crowning of King Tristan. Odin and Thor are not so far removed from Tristan and Yvaine themselves despite the many years that have passed; indeed, only several generations of monarchs have sat on the throne while outside the castle, untouched by a star's blood, their subjects live and die as ordinary mortals.

Such an effect is a good thing, though, a much needed thing, for such continuity keeps the realm steady and protected against the encroachments of both its neighbors and time. For time has moved on, on both sides of the Wall, and the delicate footing needed to secure the realm's future is the work of King Odin's life. And this is where our story begins: when another life begins. For Queen Frigga has just born a son, a healthy, boisterous babe Odin dubs _Thor_. He hopes the child will be as strong as his cries suggest, knowing he will need to use the many years of his life to teach his son the mannerisms and mind needed to be king. It is their duty to save Stormhold from ruin - and yet Stormhold is not the only thing they will save.

A boy crosses the Wall, some years later; he is ragged and frightened, running from the bombs and fire and war that tear apart even the peaceful countryside he has left behind him. He is found, as all such venturing souls are, and brought to King Odin so that the king may learn of this new danger. There, in telling his story, he moves something inside of Odin; something that has previously belonged only to the Queen and the Crown Prince. Odin decrees that he will be taken into the royal household, this child from the realm Odin's own ancestor once lived in. And so Loki Laufeyson becomes a Prince in his own right, gaining a new family for the one destroyed by a war in a world now behind him.

That, reader, is where the trouble begins.

Perhaps things may have gone another way. Perhaps if Yvaine's blood did not mean that her kin matured so slowly, or stayed so hale; if Thor did not resemble a man in his teens when Loki grew to twenties, and then twenties when he was reached his thirties. Perhaps if jealous had not begun to eat away at his heart, understanding that the throne which he sat beside would never be his for the sheer virtue of Odin and Thor's youthful vitality. Perhaps - and yet even the love of his adopted family is not enough to quench the poison which seethes within him, and which he learns to use for his own purposes. For, child of Wall or not, Loki proves to be as gifted with magic as his brother is with strength of body. Hating, hurting, Loki draws his poisons forth and sets a plan in motion...

Years later, no one in Stormhold knows the name of Thor Odinson. If you make mention of the Crown Prince they will talk of Loki with sidelong glances and dubious thoughts. There is no other heir to the throne; there never has been. There is a man in the stables, a broad-shouldered brute with looks that resemble your memory of the Prince, but he answers to the name of Huntsman and would call you drunk, or worse mad, if you were to suggest he should ever have gone by another name. You could not even speak _Thor_ should you wish to. No, the murders he is charged with committing in a drunken rage two years ago, the lives he took in a fight that he cannot remember the how or the why of, mark this man more surely than a coronet or crown. He is the Huntsman, lowly and used and the basest of the castle's servants, and he brings home drenched offerings of wild game and sought-for subjects to lay at the castle's doors.

And behind those doors, the Queen fights an unknown malady for her life.

Odin, desperate to save his wife, has stripped Stormhold of every possible cure. Charms, enchantments, objects rumored to have once belonged to the Three Witches themselves; none of them heal Frigga of the illness that saps her strength and spirit. Loki quietly runs the realm as his father goes half-mad with portending grief; the Crown Prince, too, mourns, the silver at his temples reflecting the silver tongue that has been muted with his mother's fading health. At last the King is willing to go to any lengths, any at all - and as if at his request, on an ashen evening during a fading winter, a star falls from the heavens.

A star, whose heart could restore the Queen to health.

But the legacy of Queen Yvaine is more than a long lifespan and good health. An edict has been laid upon the realm since the days of her ruling: _No star shall be harmed_. To think of finding the star for any reason other than to help her return is unimaginable. The people themselves would revolt in the streets if such a thing were suggested. Loki Silvertongue bends to his father's ear and murmurs, _then do not let them know._

So King Odin charges the Huntsman in secret: Find the star and bring her here. Do not let anyone know that which it is you do. And the Huntsman is not a dumb man, for all his size and sullen rage; he understands why such actions would be taken. But his life is the crown's to command, his hands must move at the bidding of his monarch, and in dull hatred and anger he goes forth.

He finds the star within four days; Stormhold is not a vast realm, for all that it is rich in many things. She is so little, so fierce, the silver of her gown and the intelligence in her eye a matched and gleaming set. She is brown-haired and beautiful, this star he has been summoned to retrieve, this Jane, and she is not alone. A crofter has taken her in, a young woman who watches him warily over her glasses and seems inordinately protective of the star - of Jane. And the Huntsman cannot dispel her suspicions, cannot draw himself in any fashion other than empty despair or smoldering ire. But he does his best, does not lie when he says he has been dispatched to bring them to the castle. No carriage? The crofter inquires. Nothing but his pack horse and his own mount?

There is danger, the Huntsman tells them, the words bitter in his mouth. He had the need to move fast to find her.

If there is danger, this Darcy says in answer, then she had best come too. She would see no harm come to Jane, to this star she has promised shelter to and found a friend in.

Unwilling to stain his hands with more blood, knowing he cannot stop her from raising an alarm short of her death, the Huntsman acquiesces. So they go, Huntsman and star and crofter, and it takes them more time than the Huntsman believes they have. It is time he cannot begrudge, though, and not solely for Jane's sake. They are cautious and unwilling to tolerate his roughness while his anger rides him still. With the passage of hours and days, though, he finds himself smiling, even laughing, bemused by Darcy and intrigued by Jane. In the sevenday that they spend traveling through the melting snow of the long winter, the Huntsman feels the ire within him thawing like the land around him. He cannot say the word, cannot think it for more reasons than one, but the fire of Jane's passion and her curiosity about all things mortal would make a harder man than he kind.

When they arrive at the castle, the anger has both been shorn off of the Huntsman's demeanor by their company - by Jane's company most of all - and added to it, by the knowledge of what he leads them to. But he has been commanded; he cannot disobey. He brings them to a secret set of castle doors, as he has brought sacrifices of fowl and game before, and they go to the room where King Odin and Crown Prince Loki wait, to the room where the Queen lays dying.

To the room where he thinks to plead for their lives, for a glimpse of the mercy that was shown to him.

The Huntsman has no time to make such a case, though. It is there, the coil of death snaking through the stonewalled room, that the truth is revealed. For Jane did not fall unknowing of Stormhold's troubles, nor did she fall alone. Bumbling Darcy is no crofter but a star, playing along as Jane has until they reached those who most needed to know the truth: Loki Silvertongue has set them all on this course. To win the throne he has poisoned his Queen mother, led his King father into a place where he would commit treason with unimaginable consequences. For the reality is this: Killing a star, breaking Yvaine's edict, would lead to the ruin of the realm. The name _Stormhold_ would be sundered forever more and its people with it.

To kill a star would be to kill the kingdom, as every subject and ruler of the land is taught. As everyone but Loki Silvertongue - and the beguiled, enchanted King and Huntsman- believes.

 

“And you, Loki Silvertongue, are charged with attempted regicide, attempted murder, and intent to break Queen Yvaine’s edict. How do you plead?”

The star - Jane, she is still Jane, and she is implacable as she stares Loki down, holding herself with the same grace as he has seen in the Queen. In Darcy’s careful grasp, Loki’s bewilderment never changes.

“Father, please, I don’t know what she is trying to do-”

Jane’s head lifts a fraction.

“The truth, Loki.”

A glow begins to build inside her, a gleam as if the sun has been candled in her breastbone and now pours outward through skin and clothing alike. The same glow begins to envelop Darcy, shining outward with enough light to force both the Huntsman and Odin to avert their eyes. Caught between the two radiant stars, unable to hide any longer, Loki’s pleading expression melts away to reveal a snarling and savage anger, still sharp-eyed and silver.

“Yes, of course I did it, who else in this whole damn realm would be smart enough to pull off anything of the like? Frigga’s death, Odin’s death, yours, even the Huntsman’s - all of it would have given me what I was born to have. What I should have had. What was mine!”

The light ebbs away, folding back into that place where it must be stored when it is not needed. The Huntsman blinks the afterimage from his eyes in time to see the sadness that draws across Jane’s face at Loki’s confession, making it clear she had known him to be guilty - and how he would plead, both to Odin and to the charges.

“Is there any amount of power that would be enough for you?” She asks quietly. Loki’s lips curls.

“Of course not. I could take this whole damn realm and still be hungr-”

The Prince’s voice cuts off as a spear grows from his heart, gleaming and gold in the firelight. Silence lances through the room; it is a split second of stunned quiet where both Jane and the Huntsman turn to see Odin leaning heavily on a bedpost, his staff absent from his hand. Their shock holds them even as Darcy jerks to the side and drops Loki’s body onto the floor, the only heir to Stormhold’s throne now nothing more than a corpse in elegant finery.

“He has been sentenced, and that sentence carried out,” the King pronounces. Perhaps there is rage in the corner of his good eye; perhaps disbelief is still caught in the turn of his mouth and the set of his eyebrows. But no one in the bedroom has cause to contest his verdict, nor his swiftness in seeing it through.

And yet such alacrity will still not save the Queen dying even now on the bed beside him.

Then the King sways. His face pales of its crimson shade and his grip on the bedpost loosens, letting him fall to the stone floors with one hand curling above his heart.

“Sire!” Freed from his shock the Huntsman crosses the room in a barely-controlled lunge. He touches Odin’s forehead, then the scarred hand that clutches at his tunic helplessly. From the King’s shortness of breath and the sudden onset of his illness, it is easy for the three left standing to come to the same conclusion. “No. No, you can’t be dying. You cannot die! Your heart - it must be his heart.” He jerks his head up to look at Jane. “Can you not save him?”

Jane meets his frantic gaze. “Is this what you want?”

“Of course it is!” Grief mars the Huntsman’s weathered expression, knots his calloused hands in the King’s fine furs. The Queen slipping further away on her pyre bed, the Prince lying as if he were a puppet without strings not six paces away, the King felled like a great tree in a storm. There is cause enough and more for his bewilderment, his agony.

Jane doesn’t move. “Then you know what you have to do.”

Her words don’t register with him for a heartbeat. When they do, when he understands what it is she means, his eyes fly to hers.

“There’s even two of us,” Darcy adds with an inscrutable face. Nothing can be gained from her voice or her posture. Like Jane, she could now be a statue come to life only for a moment; only for this moment. The Huntsman twists in his crouch to look at her with disbelief still writ large across his face. “So you won’t even have to choose which monarch to save.”

Breaths whisper through the air: the Queen’s shallow inhalations, the King’s strained gasping, the Huntsman’s uneven inhalations.

“You have the knife.” Jane says simply. “Use it.”

At the instruction the Huntsman’s hand goes unconsciously to the great hunting knife sheathed in the small of his back. He draws it out haltingly, as though his body is acting without the consent of his mind, and his blue eyes weigh on Jane until they flick to the dying King, the gleaming blade. For a moment he is poised to rise from his crouch, to bring the knife in front of him for use as a weapon and butchering tool all in one. In the whispered quiet of the deathroom, the conflict and anger rage through his torn expression, his heavy poise.

Then, as though it breaks something inside of him, as if a verdict has been passed on him and there can be no return, the Huntsman drops the hand holding his blade to the ground.

“I cannot,” he says shakily. His throat is thick with tears he is only just beginning to shed. “I cannot.” The words are gulped down, broken. “Forgive me, Sire.”

“Why not?” Jane asks. Her appearance has not altered.

“For love of you. For the honor of Yvaine.” The words are barely understandable, choked and broken as they are. He shakes his head as if he is trembling, the tangled blond locks of his hair sliding over his shoulders. “That is what you said, is it not? That to kill a star will break her edict?” Under his shapeless jacket his broad shoulders bow as though they now carry the weight of the realm. “Better that Stormhold have no ruler than to have no Stormhold to rule over.”

The finality of those words, the defeat in his distraught expression, does not match Jane’s sudden smile. She beams at the Huntsman, the warmth of it breaking over her face like sunlight, and moves across the chamber. The Huntsman has no time to react before she kisses him lightly, her hands cupping his bearded cheeks. Just as swiftly she breaks away and moves to the laboring King, kneeling by his other side and bending to peer into his unfocused gaze.

“He has been tested and found worthy by the trial of stars,” she says. “If you break the enchantment, Odin Brandson, I will save your life.”

The King’s free hand lifts, attempts to push at her. “Frigga,” he breathes, the name more a shaping of his lips than a true sound.

“That’s why there’s two of us.” Darcy’s echo of her own words should not hold her typical amusement and bounce, and yet it does.

“She’ll be fine.” As she had with Thor, Jane lays her hands on Odin’s jawline. “What say you?”

In response the King moves his hand to the brooch by his shoulder, the worked metal glinting in the torchlight. It has been his constant companion for more years than many, the Queen herself excluded, could remember. Even as his movements become noticeably more feeble he grasps it, fingers curling around the outline of the hammer.

“It is done,” he manages to say, and when his fingers clenched in a spasm or a purposeful motion, the brooch crumbles.

The Huntsman feels no difference, can not sense what Jane or the King were discussing, but Jane nods in satisfaction.

“I need your knife,” she says, still bent over the King, and it takes the Huntsman a moment to realize she is talking to him. He picks up the discarded blade by his knees and gives Jane an uncomprehending look; in return she holds out her hand. When he doesn’t give her the knife as requested, she flashes a fleeting grin. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill myself. Cut here, will you?”

Still not understanding, but more willing to do the deed himself, the Huntsman draws the great knife over her palm.

“The heart of a star can grant immortality,” Jane tells the King as blood began to well up, crimson and bright. “I can’t give you that. But the blood, sometimes…”

She angles her hand over the King’s parted lips and slides her uninjured hand under his head, tilting it forward. Her blood dribbles over the pale lips, the blunt teeth, trickles into his mouth - and after he swallows convulsively, perhaps more out of reflex than intent, the vise that appears to clench his chest eases.

“…can heal just enough.” Jane spares the Huntsman a glance. “Help Darcy, please?”

When he looks he finds the younger woman by Frigga’s bed, her long sleeves already rolled up and her hand exposed. He gets to his feet with an effort, every joint aching as though he is his father’s age and not in his mere fifties, and does as he is bidden. The cut is clean and nearly painless, so sharp is his blade; so sharp does he keep it, so every use would be thus.

“Thanks,” Darcy tells him, seemingly nonplussed by the blood running down her fingers. “She’ll need a little while, but she’ll be okay.”

“It is good to hear that,” he answers. Then, “Thank you.” He owes them that little for what they have done.

“Welcome,” she replies, as cheery as she had ever been, before nodding to the sheets. “Mind making a bandage out of one of those?”

The Huntsman does so, embarrassed that he had not thought to do so earlier. But perhaps there is reason enough to excuse it: the revelations of the stars, the confession of Loki Odinson, the death which hangs on his crumpled body and wreathes around both the ruling royals. In penance he swiftly fashions several others and takes them to Jane.

“There we go. He’ll be fine.” Jane wads up a bandage and presses it to her hand to staunch the bleeding.

“Father?” He asks, watching the King’s face as it regains its color; then, “Father?” as he realizes what he has said for the first time in three aching years.

Odin’s eyes open, finding Thor’s, and the wave of exultation that rolls through the Crown Prince has no place in the same room as his brother’s death - and yet it exists just the same.

—

Underneath the balcony that Thor and Jane stand on, the castle folk pass in bustling activity. They dress and act torn between jubilation and mourning: jubilation at the fact that the cruel enchantment on their Crown Prince has been lifted and mourning that it came at the cost of Loki’s own life - lost defeating the mysterious enchanter, as the tale goes. Odin declared that understanding the full extent of Loki’s treachery would weaken both Stormhold’s morale and their position among the other realms; to avoid such a fall he spread the story which best suited his own purposes and Stormhold’s. While Jane clearly has no taste for the kindness done to Loki after his death, Thor appreciates it. It is one little measure of resolution he can give himself.

“How is it that you came to be here?” Thor asks as the spring wind blows over the eaves of the castle and brushed across their overlook. It hints at green and twining things, shoots and leaves that reach for a sky no longer sickly and gray but a brilliant blue. It tastes of a promise, and he turns his face into it gladly. “Was your falling, then, a part of some greater plan?”

“You could look at it that way.” Jane leans against the railing. Her comfort with heights must surely be a part of her star nature. “Really, we’re here because of Yvaine.”

“The Star Queen?” He angles himself to look at her as he talks, the better to enjoy her company while she is by his side. “I take it then that she must have seen the beginning of Stormhold’s downfall and acted to stave it off. A great kindness, to those of us who have seemingly forgotten her.” He is quiet for a moment, then, quietly, “Would you have interfered without her desire to save her kingdom?”

Jane meets his gaze. There is a seriousness in her regard, a suggestion of consideration that speaks of eons she has spent in the night sky, watching over more than a small and nearly mythical realm. “Stars see nations rise and fall, Thor. Good men die, bad men live, and wrongs that should have been righted go on until all trace of good has been forgotten.”

He does not shiver at her words but the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck lift.

“Without Yvaine,” she continues, glancing down at the passersby as though she has no idea of how she has affected him, “we would have watched Stormhold fall too. But she went to the spiral galaxies and the nebula clusters, the constellations and red dwarfs, all across the sky, asking for stars to volunteer to intercede on her behalf.”

“And you did so,” he fills in. She shifts as though tempted to avoid a topic for the first time since he met her, and nods.

“I’ve always wanted to become human. At least for a little while.”

Thor wonders at her discomfort and chooses to let it rest. He will not spend their limited time in discord. “And Darcy?”

“We’re binary stars,” chorus two voices: Jane is one, and, distinctive both in her tone and the added, “duh,” Darcy the other. She wiggles her fingers in a greeting when they turn to the doorway and look at her. “Hey guys.”

“Where one of us goes, the other usually ends up,” Jane says by way of explanation. “That includes things like falling from the heavens. The argument you made, if I remember correctly, was that two stars would be a safer bet than just one.”

"And I was right, wasn't I?" Darcy replies smugly. Jane doesn’t appear to wonder at the other star’s presence, or how she might have wandered across them in the vast expanse of the castle. Thor takes his lead from her and inclines his head.

“Greetings, Darcy. I trust the day finds you well?”

“Yup. I just got up, too, and I have got to say, this breakfast is delicious.” She waves a baked pastry in his direction. “That’s the real reason I wanted to come. Food. Real, actual food. Do you have any idea how good this all is?”

“I must admit I do, although perhaps not to your degree of enjoyment.” He can’t help his smile at her obvious pleasure. A glance at the town square’s clock tower reveals it is close to noon. “If you visit the kitchens, you may find that lunch is very nearly ready, and that the cooks may be persuaded to part with a few morsels before they are served.”

“Really? That’s awesome. Thanks, Thor!” With that the younger star vanishes down the hallway, her cheery attitude even more evident now that she is not laboring under a disguise.

“And so the two of you fell,” Thor prompts Jane when Darcy has slipped around the corner, amusement still curling his lips.

“And here we are.”

“And here you are.” He hesitates then, a question he has wondered since his Queen mother’s recovery hovering perilously close on his tongue. It is Jane’s expression that decides him. Her strange mix of excitement and age, the passion with which she throws herself at something, the joy with which she very nearly shines - “Are you bound to stay here, then?”

“That depends.” Again Jane’s usual confidence dips into an unexpected nervousness. “Queen Yvaine made a couple of other provisions besides her edict. Your father’s already offered us access to the vault’s Babylon candles. With one of those Darcy and I can go back whenever we want.”

That might have been answer enough. But her avoidance of a direct reply oddly gives him reason to hope. Feeling as though he is dancing around the edge of an issue too important to broach, Thor asks cautiously, “Then what does your stay depend on?”

“I guess whether you meant what you said in your father’s chambers.” She throws him a look that seems to be made of nerves and anticipation. While he tries to recall precisely what it is she is referring to, for many things - and many unkind things - were said that day, she adds, “Why you couldn’t kill me.”

_“For the love of you.”_

Oh.

Thor considers his words, knowing that to simply blurt something out might ruin her feelings and improperly convey his own. The love of a star had saved his realm twice now; it had nearly been its undoing as well. Perhaps there are reasons such loves rarely came to pass. But could Jane care for him in such a way? To believe that she might is no great stretch of his imagination, not knowing what he feels for her.

Had King Tristan of old ever found himself hoping for the heart of a star in such a way? Wishing not for the thing itself, but for all that lay in it?

“I meant truly what I said,” he says carefully, “though we had known each other then but a sevenday. I will tell you now that I have known you longer, that feeling has only grown. However long you would wish to stay in Stormhold, I would be honored - and glad of it.”

Jane flushes at his answer, her cheeks high and bright in color, and studies him in silence. Thor wonders for a startling second if he should do more, say more, but cannot think what that might be. Then his eye catches Darcy leaning through the doorway to state at him, pastry still in one hand, as she mouthes ‘Kiss her,’ and points at her own lips. His shift in attention gives her away; Jane notices and turns, expression already skewing to a familiar exasperation. “Darcy-”

Before she can berate her friend Thor cuts off her ire by catching her mouth, feeling it soften as she absorbs and responds to his touch. Darcy strikes a victory pose in the doorway, thankfully after Jane has shut her eyes, and the laugh on his lips is quickly swallowed by a kiss. This star is small, so small compared to him, but the fire that burns inside her knows no bounds. Neither, he thinks, does her heart.

"Thor?" She asks when she takes a breath, her eyes half-shuttered. The sound of his true name will never cease to amaze him.

"Aye?"

"Just wanted to make sure we weren't back under some kind of spell."

"Too late for that," he tells her.

Star, woman, or both, he would love her. And she, it would seem, him.

And this, reader, is where our story ends - and another begins.


End file.
